Languages in Contrast - Volume 14, Issue 1, 2014

Multi-Dimensional analyses have been conducted for many different discourse domains and many different languages. Using bottom-up statistical analyses, these studies have investigated specific patterns of register variation in several different discourse domains of English, as well as the more general patterns of register variation in many different languages. Each study identifies linguistic dimensions that are peculiar to that particular language/domain. However, the more theoretically interesting finding is that linguistically similar dimensions emerge in nearly all of these studies. Two of these dimensions are especially robust, making them strong candidates for universal dimensions of register variation: 1) a fundamental opposition between clausal/‘oral’ discourse vs. phrasal/‘literate’ discourse, and 2) the opposition between narrative vs. non-narrative discourse. The present paper introduces the methodology of Multi-Dimensional analysis and surveys the research studies carried out to date, with an emphasis on these potentially universal patterns of register variation.

This paper discusses register as a meaningful unit of contrastive linguistics and translation studies. Drawing on systemic functional register theory, it categorizes different approaches to register-oriented cross-linguistic studies emphasizing either the comparison of contrasted features organized by register or that of registers using features as operationalizations. The approach is exemplified with the help of sample analyses of the English-German CroCo Corpus, a corpus containing originals and translations from eight different registers. In order to account for the systematic contrastive differences in frequencies of compared features, the magnitude of difference between register-specific and register-neutral frequencies is contrasted. The paper finally discusses complex register-specific combinations of indicators and shows how these help to identify translation properties.

Contrastive studies of phraseology have tended to focus on figurative units, such as idioms and metaphors, and paid comparatively less attention to less colourful types of units such as collocations and lexical bundles, which are equally, if not more, worthy of study. This article tries to fill this gap by exploring the potential contribution of a lexical bundle approach to language comparison. Some guidelines are presented to help solve some of the methodological challenges posed by a cross-linguistic comparison of lexical bundles. The approach is illustrated with a study of lexical bundles in English and French with a particular focus on units that have a metadiscursive function. Two different genres are compared — parliamentary debates and newspaper editorials — in an attempt to tease out systemic differences between languages and genre effects.

This paper explores the discourse-structuring functions of initial adverbial adjuncts in English and Norwegian news and fiction. Such discourse functions have to do with discourse linking and information management. The corpus study reveals frequency differences in the use of initial adjuncts across the languages, which are to some extent connected with an overall greater frequency of adjuncts in Norwegian. While initial adjuncts in fiction often signal cohesive relations, those in news are more typically due to backgrounding of less important information or to framing/scene-setting for the clause message. Norwegian initial adjuncts are even less likely than English ones to convey new information; on the other hand, initial position is to a lesser extent associated with contrastive focus in Norwegian. This, together with the higher frequency of initial adjuncts in Norwegian, suggests that initial placement of adjuncts carries a lower degree of markedness in Norwegian than in English.

This paper compares and contrasts the patterns of variation exhibited by canonical tag questions ((C)TQs) in English (e.g. ‘That’s enough, isn’t it?’) with those presented by their analogous constructions in Spanish (Es suficiente, ¿no?/ ¿verdad?) and Portuguese (É suficiente, não é?/não?) across a variety of spoken genres that represent the monologic-dialogic, formal-informal and private-public oppositions. The aim is to provide previously lacking comparative statistics that emerge from this trilingual comparison along four parameters: (i) frequencies, (ii) formal features, (iii) distribution across genres, and (iv) functional characteristics. It will be observed that English CTQs are less frequent than analogous constructions in Spanish and particularly in Portuguese. A tag/polarity-based scale will also be proposed in which Portuguese situates itself at one extreme in displaying the widest array of variant and invariant tag types; at the other extreme is Spanish allowing for invariant tags only, whereas English occupies a middle position as it admits both invariant and variant tags but the latter exhibit less variability in kind than their Portuguese counterparts. Lastly, it will be shown that English CTQs display less distributional and functional flexibility than the analogous constructions in the two Romance languages under analysis.

We present a quantitative analysis of evaluative language in a genre in which it is particularly prominent, that of movie reviews. The data chosen are non-professional consumer-generated reviews written in English, German and Spanish. The reviews are analysed in terms of the categories of Attitude and Graduation within the Appraisal framework (Martin and White, 2005). A number of similarities in the distribution of the Appraisal subcategories were found across the three languages, such as the high frequency of Appreciation and the narrow relationship between the global polarity of the reviews and the individual polarity of the spans. More importantly, the analysis uncovers a number of cross-linguistic distributional differences, which may be explained in terms of a wide array of factors, such as lexicogrammar, word order, argumentative style or sociocultural reasons.